Alfred Tennyson's success with In Memoriam (1850) was
exceptional: the poem helped define an age in poetry. But eventually it
was a success that turned against him. Max Beerbohm's drawing
"Mr. Tennyson reading In Memoriam to his Sovereign" (1904)
made fun of the poet's special relationship with the Queen in a
shared bond of grief, recognizing camp theatricality. Was the Queen, the
caricature seemed to ask, as performative about her loss as Tennyson?
Making fun of In Memoriam and setting distances between it and the new
were, it may be, necessary acts of later generations. But it is easy to
forget that Tennyson himself was, in distinctive ways, willing to
distance himself from his lament for Arthur Henry Hallam. This is an
essay about Tennyson's parodic and ironic energies after and
against In Memoriam, and it suggests a wit and self-critical energy not
often associated with his melancholy and sincere poetics. In Memoriam is
anxious to discriminate between different understandings of how the dead
might live after the tomb: it is a kind of critical encyclopaedia of
forms of survival. But Maud (1855), embarrassed by the final commitment
in the elegy to the possibilities of the return of living souls,
diversely parodied its predecessor's most precious concerns,
upturning them by placing them in the mouth of a man of uncertain
sanity. Isobel Armstrong dismisses the emotional apex of In Memoriam
with half a sentence. In "[lyric] XCV," she says, "the
poet achieves a visionary, longed-for union with the dead." (1)
That is all. Armstrong's comment is symptomatic of how hard it is
for contemporary readers to deal with the strangest lyric of the elegy:
it is too significant a moment to be considered so economically. Maud
was partly organized to deal, in bold as well as in subtle encrypted
ways, with the consequences of having claimed that the dead return, and
with what, precisely, Armstrong's "visionary" instant
really involved. Maud set a distance between Tennyson in 1855 and In
Memoriam, and it was diversely self-conscious about the elegy's
dealings with the deceased. Maud, I suggest, does not express, as recent
critics have thought, an increase in Tennyson's scepticism about
human values tout court. It implies doubtfulness about non-empirical
experience, such as that which In Memoriam ventured. But this is
scepticism that is closer to common sense or reasonableness. At its most
affirmative, Maud is a poem expressive of the poet's desires to
place his feet more firmly on the ground, a rebuke for an earlier
inclination to yield to the chimerae produced by grief, and an effort to
break from In Memoriam's public yearning for what seemed for a
moment in 1855 like improbable reunion. Maud's palimpsest of In
Memoriam was not the end of the story and Tennyson returned swiftly to
the possibility of the dead's continuance. But that return makes
Maud's pause even more intriguing and powerful.

The death of Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833 was, to his friends and
family, devastating in part because it was premature. Hallam was twenty
two, beginning a career in the law, and newly engaged to Emily Tennyson.
Premature in one sense, the news of that death did not, in another,
arrive early enough. By the time Henry Elton, Hallam's uncle, wrote
to inform Alfred Tennyson, as the brother of Hallam's fiancee, on
October 1, 1833, his nephew had been dead for more than two weeks. It
was a letter before its time, and after. There had been little warning
of the impending calamity. Hallam's ill-health had been
inauspicious, no doubt. But the only other indication had been, the
Tennysons claimed much later, the glimpse of a ghost. "Almost all
instances of alleged supernatural appearances," confidently
remarked Isaac Taylor, author of the Natural History of Enthusiasm
(1829), a background presence in In Memoriam (1850), "may easily be
disposed of." But "no such explanation will meet the many
instances ... in which the death of a relative, at a distance, has been
conveyed, in all its circumstances, to persons during sleep." (2)
Yet what about similar messages about a relative, or a soon-to-be
relative, not received in sleep? It was hard, certainly, for the
Tennyson family to dispose of a claim about a death in the Tennyson
circle conveyed in waking consciousness. Long after Hallam's
demise, Emily Tennyson wrote in her journal that Mary and Matilda
Tennyson, the poet's sisters, had been taking a late September walk
in 1833 through a lane at Somersby. The sisters saw a tall figure,
clothed in white: it cannot have been at first persuasive for they
thought for a moment it was a goat. They followed it as it turned
through a hedge where there was no gap: the effect, by now, was
startling. Robert Bernard Martin put Matilda's reaction thus: she
"was so perplexed that she went home and burst into troubled
tears." (3) But Emily Tennyson--Martin's source--said in fact
that she was "so awed ... she burst into tears." (4) Being
awed is not being troubled. Whatever the case, the memory was thirty-six
years old.

Tennyson would later, in In Memoriam, claim Hallam as half divine
and, convinced or otherwise, as a fore-runner of a higher race of men.
The supernatural premonition remembered by the Tennyson family lent to
that representation a not inconvenient sense of Tennyson's friend
as especially touched, peculiarly attended. But ghosts belonged with In
Memoriam in more consequential ways. Indeed, a reader of the most
celebrated elegy of the Victorian period, heralded by a ghost, was
provided in Mary and Matilda's story with an unexpected clue to
some of the poem's most substantial of insubstantial ruminations. A
text intrigued by questions of the speaking dead, it found in an
inventive proximity to and rejection of ghost narratives and gothic
tropes a way of shaping its thought about consolations and a way of
probing hopes. Involved with imagined returns, In Memoriam was, in one
sense, a set of speculations on how the dead might survive, on what a
ghost was and was not, and about the knowledge that could be obtained
about the life beyond. In its thoughts on these, In Memoriam
distinguished versions of the phantom, claiming at last, but only for an
instant, the power of words to summon not a specter but, apparently, a
living soul. In Memoriam was a meditation on types of posthumous return:
it was a ghostology--a Victorian word--which assessed understandings of
the place of the departed on earth. And as such, it was energetically
rebuked by Maud.

The sound of Hallam's voice, long after his death, would not
leave Tennyson. Or rather, it had left him so completely he could not
stop thinking of it. Tennyson's breath, as Eric Griffiths has
beautifully shown, was uniquely modulated: (5) but the most important
thing for the poet after 1833 about Hallam's was that it had
ceased. Amid the silence, the dead calm of the noble breast,
Tennyson's pensive imagination felt Hallam's absence most
painfully in the inaudibility of his voice. "Break, break,
break" (1842), written shortly after Hallam's death, made the
reader puncture a deathly silence with broken words: in that carefully
enunciated opening line, the commas provided the briefest moments of
pause as the reader makes silence give away to sound and sound give way
to silence with a stilted, painstaking control. Yet the burden of the
poem was to describe a silence that could not be broken. "O for the
touch of a vanished hand," Tennyson wrote, in words often quoted by
spiritualists, "And the sound of a voice that is still!" (6)
Making a conspicuous quibble, the line could not help asking the reader
to imagine a voice that, still, was still. Shaking a hand and speaking
were the outline actions of greeting Hallam as if all had been normal,
as if he had returned from Vienna in better health. The imagined welcome
figured his loss--dead of a congenital brain disease--in spare metonymy.
And the thought of greeting Hallam troubled In Memoriam with a return
from the dead that, it seemed, could never be.

The longing for a touch of a vanished hand was a desire to meet.
Yet images of the arms and hands of the dead, if they figured the joyful
hope of coming together, hinted also at the macabre. The gothic lingered
in the longed-for warmth of once-living flesh. The hand of the dead, the
dead hand, a mortmain, the spectral fingers reaching from the grave:
along with the giant hand Bianca sees in The Castle of Otranto (1765),
images of dead or ghostly hands were familiar terms of night terror.
Emily Bronte, writing Lockwood's nocturnal experience of a
longed-for greeting in Wuthering Heights (1847), created the most
memorable of such scenes. Dwelling on the gothic frisson, Tennyson could
not rid himself of the thought of Hallam's dead hand, even in a
state of decay. It seems better, he said in lyric X of In Memoriam,
thinking about Hallam's corpse, to be buried at home in a village
churchyard, than that

the roaring wells
Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;
And hand so often clasped in mine,
Should toss with tangle and with shells. (X.17-20)

A hand clasped by fronds not fingers and consumed by impersonal
forces of the deep: craving for the touch of the vanished hand, the
lyric fantasized what might make that hand, literally, vanish.

At once incongruous to the history of a dearly-felt loss, the
gothic was coherent with In Memoriam's veiled dealings with the
ghostly in all their complicated diversity] There were twilight scenes
of hoped-for visitations, provoking a flicker of nocturnal fear:
"Be near me when my light is low/When the blood creeps, and the
nerves prick / And tingle" (L.1-3). There was a sense of being
watched from the grave ("So mayst thou watch me where I weep"
[LXIII.9]); glimpses of supernatural forms ("Cloud-towers by
ghostly masons wrought" [LXX.5]); a gloomy ancestral hall and
meditations on Hallam's decaying body in Clevedon churchyard where
vegetation entwined his crumbling form, "fibres" gathered
about the "dreamless head" and "roots" were
"wrapt about the bones" (II.3, 4). There was an imagined
moment of reaching from the tomb: Hallam's "Unused example
from the grave" would, Tennyson said, "Reach out dead hands to
comfort me" (LXXX.15,16). If the mood was of consolation, the
image, a skeleton animated, was not. There were strange trances (XII)
and non-human voices--Love, Nature, Melpomene. Death made itself heard
in lyric LXXXI, answering back to Tennyson's grief. And there were
moments of quieter gothic suggestiveness. Lyric LXVII presented Tennyson
in another scene of twilight reverie, thinking of the church where
Hallam lay. Affectionate and reverent, the stanzas conjured an image of
a half-animated funerary tablet, hinting at the possibility of
disclosure as much as its unlikeliness. As Tennyson thought of dawn over
Clevedon, "I know the mist is drawn/A lucid veil from coast to
coast," he said:

And in the dark church like a ghost
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn. (LXVII.15-16)

Glimmering, the arch state of Tennyson at his most ambivalently
suggestive, was the condition of being present and absent, visible not
graspable. The tablet's reflected light gave nothing back even as
it seemed to suggest glimmers of meaning, of vitality, beyond the tomb.

Northanger Abbey (1818) drained the power from a Radcliffean
gothic, turning night horrors into the amusingly and reassuringly
mundane. Tennyson, whose favourite novelist, before his later enthusiasm
for the writing of M. E. Braddon, was Jane Austen, altered the nature of
the gothic in summoning it too. But he did not change it into the
quotidian. Its presence underlined death's materiality, the
business of the grave with bones and decay. But the gothic also affirmed
how In Memoriam could not rid itself of concern with the survival of the
soul and the interpenetration of the earthly world by the dead. In the
first recoil of grief, Tennyson tormented himself with an encounter
which was uncannily normal, a (false) testament to the fact Hallam had
not died, predicated on a (false) conditional:

If one should bring me this report,
That thou hadst touched the land today,
And I went down unto the quay,
And found thee lying in the port;
And standing, muffled round with woe,
Should see thy passengers in rank
Come stepping lightly down the plank,
And beckoning unto those they know;
And if along with these should come
The man I held as half-divine;
Should strike a sudden hand in mine,
And ask a thousand things of home;
And I should tell him all my pain,
And how my life had dropped of late,
And he should sorrow o'er my state
And marvel what possessed my brain;
And I perceived no touch of change,
No hint of death in all his frame,
But found him all in all the same,
I should not feel it to be strange. (XIV.1-20)

This was, and was not, a return from the dead. Defying Alcestis,
the moment of reunion made, with a peculiar combination of unemotional
normality and choking grief, a revisitation defiantly unmiraculous.
Confirming that Tennyson could not at first believe his friend was dead
anyway, the lyric's confusion of tenses brought memory and hope
together, confounding exactly when the moment of return could be.
"I should tell him ... should sorrow ... should not feel"
looked towards the desired meeting, while "I perceived ... found
him all in all the same" dragged the anticipation back to a
retrospective point, as if it was something recalled. Confusing time,
the lyric also confused Hallam with Tennyson. When the poet imagined his
friend marvelling at "what possessed my brain," a more
miserable truth momentarily appeared: what had been the really
devastating "marvel" was what possessed Hallam's brain, a
disease unnoticed from birth.

Thinking of how imagination might torment the living by temporarily
overlooking the fact of death, Tennyson's fantasy was marked by the
perplexity of grief. But the presence of the dead among the living was a
lasting theme. Two months after the news of Hallam's death,
Tennyson heard from his companion at Cambridge, Richard Monckton Milnes
(1809-85). "A letter from you was like a messenger from the land of
shadows," he said. (8) He could not rid himself of that language.
How might one keep in touch with those one could not touch? Shifting
between imaginings of the living soul's continuation in a heavenly
afterlife and a fantasy of a more spectral kind, Tennyson probed the Old
English meaning of "ghost" (gast) as soul, and its added
Middle English sense as specter. "[Y]et that this could be,"
he said in lyric XLI.9, imagining a visit to Hallam's soul in
heaven:

That I could wing my will with might
To leap the grades of life and light,
And flash at once, my friend, to thee. (XLI.10-12)

The envisaged greeting of soul to soul--"My Ghost may feel
that thine is near" (XCIII.16)--replaced the impossible earthly
welcome that the poem desired. Death prompted a dream of cosmic flight,
figured in the language of the telegraph, as if Heaven was a visitable
place in the known, reachable world. (That "flash" of human
presence would return.) Having invited Hallam's soul to be near him
at night in lyric L ("Be near me when my light is low," 1. 1),
Tennyson, being visited not visiting, worried about what exactly the
experience might be like. What might Hallam's living self, his
presence without a body, do to him? What might he see? "Do we
indeed," Tennyson pondered, "desire the dead / Should still be
near us at our side?" (L1.1-2). This was not exactly a conventional
fear of meeting a ghost, but sudden uncertainty about what a living
presence gifted with inner sight--a higher man who could see all--might
observe. Is there no "baseness we would hide? / No inner vileness
that we dread?," he inquired (LI.3-4).

Thinking about seeing a simulacrum that appeared to be Hallam,
Tennyson elsewhere found his scepticism likely to defeat his desire for
consolation.

If any vision should reveal
Thy likeness, I might count it vain
As but the canker of the brain;
Yea, though it spake and made appeal
To chances where our lots were cast
Together in the days behind,
I might but say, I hear a wind
Of memory murmuring the past.
Yea, though it spake and bared to view
A fact within the coming year;
And though the months, revolving near,
Should prove the phantom-warning true,
They might not seem thy prophecies,
But spiritual presentiments,
And such refraction of events
As often rises ere they rise. (XCII.1-16)

Like those who would not believe in the returning spirit of Dives,
the poet could not prepare himself to believe even the most convincing
sign that a ghostly form was his returning friend even though that form
was as close to the real as "rises" was to the final rhyme
word it very nearly repeated. Maud, Tennyson's son remembered, was
a "little Hamlet." (9) In Memoriam was Hamlet-like too not
least in thinking about spirits' meaning, their truthfulness and
authenticity--and how tempting it was not to believe in them.

"You lose a friend," one disapproving mid-period
clergyman wrote: "you want the spiritual world opened so that you
may have communication with him. In a highly-wrought, nervous, and
diseased state of mind, you go and put yourself in that
communication." (10) He meant the seance. Adjudicating between
forms of reprise, choosing between the returning soul, the doubted
vision, and the "visual shade of some one lost," In Memoriam
looked for communication of different kinds, but never, despite the
poet's "nervous ... state of mind" to a spiritualist.
Encounters with the dead--nervously, with dubiety--In Memoriam sought
nonetheless. Consuming itself with worry about how the dead could be
met, and what desire for such meeting suggested about the poet's
state of mind, In Memoriam returned to forms of human return with an
anxious but insistent fascination. Lazarus was brought from the charnel
house, the poet observed of the New Testament miracle in lyric XXXI, a
man "raised up by Christ!" (1. 13). But it was to his silence
that Tennyson was drawn, a silence that was the quintessence of the
poem's fascination with what lay beyond dust. Of what Lazarus knew
from the world beyond, nothing was said: Lazarus "told it not; or
something sealed / The lips of that Evangelist" (XXXI.15-16),
Tennyson said, with desire, sorrow, suspicion, and vexation behind that
"something." Enigmatic reticence wreathed the return of the
typological anticipator of Jesus' resurrection. And at the seeming
return of Hallam in lyric XCV--the emotional centre of a poem absorbed
with the terms by which the dead might be known--the news the departed
brought was hidden too.

Extraordinary and unrecountable that return was, all the same.
Beginning in twilight, where bats flew through the skies "and
wheeled or lit the filmly shapes / That haunt the dusk"
(XCV.10-11), lyric XCV commenced with a hint of the ghost story, another
touch of the gothic. Surely, this was to be a narrative of a haunted
night? But the gothic potential of the darkened house and the flitting
bats was again denied. The "genial warmth" of the evening,
accompanied by the singing of old songs, belonged in no episode of Ann
Radcliffe or Monk Lewis or Eliza Parsons: the tapers burned with
calmness, "unwavering," and "The brook alone far-off was
heard" (XCV.6,7) in a scene not of terror but of reassuring repose.
The lyric was a narrative of the nocturnal visitation by the dead
nevertheless, even if its interest was in a bodiless return, the claimed
revelation of a soul not the longed-for grasp of a hand. "But when
those others, one by one," Tennyson said, beginning the story of
his night-time experience,

Withdrew themselves from me and night,
And in the house light after light
Went out, and I was all alone,
A hunger seized my heart; I read
Of that glad year which once had been,
In those fallen leaves which kept their green,
The noble letters of the dead:
And strangely on the silence broke
The silent-speaking words, and strange
Was love's dumb cry defying change
To test his worth; and strangely spoke
The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell
On doubts that drive the coward back,
And keen thro' wordy snares to track
Suggestion to her inmost cell.
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last
The living soul was flashed on mine,
And mine in this was wound, and whirled
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world.
AEonian music measuring out
The steps of Time--the shocks of Chance--The
blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancelled, stricken through with doubt. (XCV.18-44)

Hedged and qualified, Tennyson's scene of "fallen leaves
which kept their green" was stalled between the awe of recognizing
an apparent presence and corrosive dubiety about what it really was.
Silent-speaking words offered a moment both craved and not entirely
believed in. "How good men have desired to see a ghost,"
Browning's Mr Sludge says complacently, without much consciousness
of the significance of his deceptions. (11) But In Memoriam, finding
little of comfort in other imagined visitations, fantasized in this
final revivalist act not a ghost but Hallam's living soul, visiting
through the seeming force of undisclosed words. If ghosts in the gothic
tradition brought terror, the flash of Hallam's being, however
momentarily, brought luminous improbability that nonetheless consoled.
Not one of Tennyson's models--"Lament for Bion,"
"Lycidas," "Adonais"--had ventured such a scene, and
if after Maud Tennyson returned to the uncanny survival of messages from
the dead, lyric XCV of In Memoriam remained the most personal and
audacious of the future Laureate's intrigues with moments of their
revisitation.

"The soul or spirit of a man is immaterial," said James
Thacher in his Essay on Demonology, Ghosts and Apparitions, and Popular
Superstitions (1831), pursuing the logic of his own suspicions: and it
is, "of course intangible and invisible." So, if it is
"not recognisable by our senses," he continued: "how can
the dead appear to the living? That disembodied spirits should
communicate with surviving objects on earth ... that the spirit of the
wise and good should return to proffer instructions ... must be deemed
unphilosophical." (12) The fear of being
"unphilosophical" for Tennyson in 1850 was irrelevant--he was
worried rather about the fear of being the dupe of pain. Yet, despite
the caution in his nervous "seemed," despite the swift
admission of the inadequate nature of language to narrate the
experience, and despite the subsequent history of the poet's
complicated rethinking of what had occurred, the lyric of Hallam's
return fashioned an image of re-union that elsewhere the poem had
yearned for but not obtained. "Vague words!," Tennyson said,
faced with the difficulties of recounting the event:

how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Or even for intellect to reach
Through memory that which I became. (XCV.46-48)

"Matter-moulded forms of speech" offered only the outer
shell of meaning. Yet the mouldering of matter, the decaying of
Hallam's body, had, all the same, been momentarily put to one side.
Angela Leighton sums up the force of In Memoriam's efforts to
contact the dead with the unanswered question: "Ghost, can you see
us, hear us?" (13) Yet the elegy, in its climax, approached a
half-proposal that, as it was not a ghost Tennyson had wished to
contact, it was not a ghost he had, for a moment, known. It was a living
man, returned animate from the dead. Looking back on the consolation
others found in In Memoriam, Tennyson declared flatly that "it is
very little that words can do." (14) Yet the possibility that words
in the poem could do something, that some mysterious power remained in
their deepest being to permit the return of a living soul, had not been
wholly absent from In Memoriam's painfully discriminating,
painfully cautious, speculations that culminated in its most un-gothic
gothic scene.

Arthur Hallam's living soul was "present" but for an
instant--and it was impersonal and Lazarus-like in its silence about the
nature of life beyond the grave. It was also almost immediately doubted.
But if doubts came quickly in the poem, so, later in Tennyson's
career, the notion that his friend had in someway returned, that he had
been present in an un-analyzable moment of revelation, became a matter
of serious discomfort. Intrigued by the mental states that follow
bereavement, the fluctuations of faith and changes of mood; absorbed by
a lost central figure whose identity remains hidden; drawn over again to
scenes of meeting, including the longed-for embrace with the vanished;
continually juxtaposing the language of love with that of the grave;
continually searching out what higher purposes may be knowable through
personal calamity; and intrigued by the multiple forms in which the dead
might take their place with the living: these are not, despite
appearances, descriptions of In Memoriam. They are a summary of Maud,
the antiphonal voice, claimed Tennyson, to the elegy. Maud was
antiphonal, perhaps--but it was also resistant. About ways in which the
past shaped the future--the vivid memory of the death of the
speaker's father, the marriage pledge of the speaker and Maud as a
child--Maud was peculiarly conscious of Tennyson's own past as a
poet. In Memoriam had shaped Tennyson's public reputation.
Tampering creatively with the elegy's legacy, Maud endeavored to
define territory for itself in the shadow of an exceptional product of
grief. Yet Maud's challenge to In Memoriam was not only an act of
poetic space-clearing, a challenge driven by the anxiety that a
writer's past might injuriously overshadow his present (Tennyson
would return to this subject). Ruminating on death, the borders between
the quick and the dead, and what words might cross them, Maud made its
richest ironic capital out of an act of self-admonishment about lyric
XCV, parodying what had seemed part of the best hope, the highest prize,
of In Memoriam.

Maud's figuration of the mental anguish of a man who has loved
and lost retold the story of In Memoriam in alternative terms. It took
the elegy's sense of Tennyson as "A weight of nerves without a
mind" (XII.7) to make a history of a nervous, neurotic man
struggling to control his damaged life. The elegy presented a voice that
turned from inner grief to public questions of theology and science:
Maud proposed--Maud's speaker proposed--enthusiasm for the Crimean
War as a resolution to a private malaise. In more local but persistent
ways, Maud engaged with and rebuffed the substance of its precursor. But
it did so most frequently by dwelling on the figures of the poem's
mourning and its longing to know the dead. It took the fascination with
the presences, durability, and communicative power of the deceased in In
Memoriam and made them the convictions of a man of troubled sanity.

Unkindly greeted by reviewers, as Tennyson saw it, Maud could not
forget the significance of welcomes and acknowledgements. In
Memoriam's yearning for Hallam, imagined at the harbour, in heaven,
as a skeletal hand stretching from the grave, as a touch that was no
touch, was changed in Maud into a set of encounters, literal bodily
meetings, of increasing jeopardy. Those greetings were symptomatic of
the way Maud entered the substance, the imaginative and emotional fabric
of the elegy, to pursue new, alternative meanings. Through changed
scenes of welcome, In Memoriam's language of mourning was, in part,
undone. Greetings were the events around which Maud's dramatic
progress was arranged--yet they signified not the loss of something in
the past, but the failure of a hoped-for future. They are the closest
the speaker comes to knowing Maud. Yet they grow in capacity to harm and
the grasping hand of welcome in the first poem is finally transformed in
the climatic horror of the second into a striking, murderous fist. The
speaker sees his beloved infrequently and usually by chance--"Whom
but Maud should I meet / Last night"(I.VI.196-197) (15)--but the
scenes of encounter become those that necessitate or precipitate
partings. He sees Maud with the "new-made lord" (I.X.332) and
is jealous; with her brother and his "stony British stare"
(I.XIII.465) and is humiliated; and, disastrously, he sees Maud with her
brother and the "babe-faced lord" (II. I.13) in the garden at
the close of Part I, and is driven to apparently murderous wrath. In
Memoriam desired re-unions that would mean the dissolution of grief:
Maud turns greetings into grief.

Maud was written against In Memoriam most noticeably when its
subject was explicitly the dead. "Poor Maud," (16) as Tennyson
came to call the "very roughly treated" poem, (17) could not
let the subject go, and with that theme Maud most deftly created its
best distances from Tennyson's anonymous "signature"
poem. Beginning with suicide and ending with war, Maud circled around
paternal loss, conscious of the "spirit of murder ... in the very
means of life" (I.I.40), and those killed in war, while
persistently confusing the states of life and death. From forms of
vitality beyond the tomb, it made a succession of its sharpest ironies.
And if those ironies could be in unlikely places, they could also touch
the central enigmas of the poetry. Seeing the presence of the living
among the dead, and vice versa, as an act of perceptual confusion, Maud
placed a question mark over the assumptions and emotional resolutions of
In Memoriam, as if it was reproachful of its predecessor, embarrassed by
its succumbing to the untestable in answer to emotional need. Many a
reader has wondered whether Maud is, within the single perspective
provided by the poem, "real" or not: is the tale told by the
speaker meant to be a delusion, or is Maud, within the text, intended to
possess external reality? Is the poem a drama of the mind alone? Yet
among the doubts about Maud's reality is the more persistent oddity
not whether she is real but whether she is alive. A woman of whom the
speaker asks, "What is she now?" (I.I.73), Maud admits no firm
answer, caught between life and the phantom's state. Oscillating in
the speaker's vocabulary between two worlds, Maud drifts through
Tennyson's language as a hybrid being, flickering between different
forms of being. "Maud is here, here, here" (I.XII.423), but
where is that, exactly?

"Dead," symptomatically, creeps in as the most unlikely
of adjectives in this perceptual confusion. Maud is "Dead
perfection, no more" (I.II.83). The "no more" means first
of all that her perfection is not more than perfect, but the stark
monosyllables, "no more," are a synonym of "dead"
all the same. She is "Pale with the golden beam of an eyelash dead
on the cheek" and her whole face seems without life:
"passionless, pale, cold" (I.III.91). Frigidly, coldly
perfect, Maud is caught between existence as living alabaster and dead,
chilly, materiality. Once she is "lain in the lilies of life"
(I.IV.161). But, despite that "life," she sounds uncomfortably
close to a corpse in a funeral parlour. Sitting by a pillar alone in
church, she is placed as if underground with a funerary image above her.
"An angel watching an urn" observes her: it "Wept over
her, carved in stone" (I.VIII.304). That sounds more like a
churchyard. Maud seems briefly like her mother, dead "in her
grave" with an "image in marble above" (I.IV.159): the
scene set up her odd co-existence on both sides of the tomb with an
element of theatricality. Elsewhere, she is a phantom before she has
died. Thinking, in Part 1, of Maud's garden and a surprise visit,
the speaker drifts again into the language of night visitations that had
tempted Tennyson in In Memoriam:

I thought as I stood, if a hand, as white
As ocean-foam in the moon, were laid
On the hasp of the window, and my Delight
Had a sudden desire, like a glorious ghost, to glide,
Like a beam of the seventh Heaven, down to my side,
There were but a step to be made. (I.XIV.505-510)

Another imagining of non-corporeal movement, the lines reconceived
Emily Bronte's account of Lockwood's nocturnal visitor into a
union that is desired, not terrifying. But the image retained its sense
of Maud's living deadness, her position between conflicting forms
of being. And its disconcerting Shelleyan formulation of a
"glorious ghost" animated by a "sudden desire" added
a frisson of necrophilia to the scene's sexual dynamic. In the
slippage between one vocabulary and another, Maud offered its reader a
conundrum of human identity, asking a question about what strange forms
of life existed behind the "death-white curtain drawn" that
hid Maud from the world (I.XIV.522).

The vocabulary of the speaker's self-representation is drawn
to ominous confusions of life and death. Aidan Day reads such confusions
as a sign of the wholesale collapse of value systems in the poem, a
feature of its movement towards what he calls nihilism. "The real
problem in Maud," he suggests, "is that the happy and blessed
spirit is not fundamentally separable from the abiding phantom cold. All
dualistic distinctions asserted by the protagonist collapse into an
undifferentiated monism." (18) But such collapses should not be the
basis of such generalized and dark conclusions, for the confusions of
state are functions--far more ironic, inventively parodic than Day sees
them--of Maud's desire to be doubtful about, and distant from, In
Memoriam. The blending of life into death is about the re-prisioning of
Tennyson's poetic past more than a foundation of Nietzschean
pessimism avant la lettre. The elegy hoped that the departed might
survive among the living, but Maud, tangling up the quick and the dead,
makes the inability to distinguish between them a function of mental
instability. Watching Maud in church (underneath the angel), the
speaker's heart "beat stronger / And thicker"
(I.VIII.308-309): that is both testimony to vitality and death, to an
intensifying desire and a hint of clogging arterial unhealthiness. But
as a figure on the threshold of the grave or of life, Maud herself more
directly parodied In Memoriam's elaborate preoccupation with the
tenacity of the dead, their interfusion in the wor(l)ds of the living.
After the incident with Maud's brother, does she really die?
Matthew Campbell is certain that she does. "In the second part of
Maud, an apparition of the loved one's ghost comes back to haunt
him," he remarks. (19) If there is an obscure equivocation between
a "ghost" and the "apparition" of a ghost here,
there is also an assumption which the text does not quite allow. Does
the statement in Part 2.III that "She is but dead" (1. 139)
mean she has literally died, of grief, of shock? Or she is now, after
the killing of her brother, metaphorically dead to the speaker? When he
then imagines Maud standing at his own grave, what understanding of
mental turmoil must the reader have? "She is not of us I
divine," he says, imagining himself looking at a ghost of someone
who had never really seemed alive anyway: "She comes from another
stiller world of the dead" (II.V.308). What does he mean by this?
Is she dead (for real), or is this hallucinatory grief?

The text's playful refusal to confirm turned back to In
Memoriam with all the force of impatience, undercutting the notion of
visitation that was once a momentary answer to bereavement with
complicated irony and mistrust. Maud probes arguments for and against
the Crimean War. It is a meditation on the relationship between lyricism
and insanity, a study of hereditary insanity, a consideration of the
place of femininity in masculinity, and many other things. But it is
also a sophisticated act of self-definition against an act of imagining
that Tennyson could no longer quite own but which continued, so to
speak, to haunt his mind even in the midst of his labour to exorcise it.

Nowhere was the parodic vigour of Maud on the subject,
specifically, of the communicating dead more pointed than in the
speaker's imagined graveyard scene--another spry instance when the
monodrama appropriated the terms of Hamlet. Shifting the reader's
uncertainty of the borders between the living and the dead into a
fantasy of being buried alive, the speaker's maddened rumination on
the nightmare of immolation offered the most conspicuously upturned
notion of In Memoriam's concern with communicative power from
beyond the grave. It is a version in which the nature of emotional
longing is grotesquely transformed from a desire to meet again into a
desire to be more dead. Hamlet fails to converse with the dead skull of
Yorick. Tennyson's speaker utters words not from but to the dead,
yet which are not part of a conversation either. This was one of the
highest moments of the insanity that seemed "truth to nature"
to a "madhouse Doctor," Tennyson later, proudly, said. (20)

"Dead, long dead, / Long dead!," the speaker of Maud,
says, believing himself the nemesis of Maud's brother, and now
thrust under ground:

And my heart is a handful of dust,
And the wheels go over my head,
And my bones are shaken with pain,
For into a shallow grave they are thrust,
Only a yard beneath the street,
And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,
The hoofs of the horses beat,
Beat into my scalp and my brain,
With never an end to the stream of passing feet,
Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying,
Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter,
And here beneath it is all as bad,
For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;
To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?
But up and down and to and fro,
Ever about me the dead men go;
And then to hear a dead man chatter
Is enough to drive one mad. (II.V.241-258)

Imagining himself buried under a pavement, the speaker hears the
dead talk. Tennyson, from Hallam's first loss to his last poems,
wondered about sounds that had vanished into the grave. But this was
their darkly comic other, a sound coming out of the grave. The language
of eternity, "never an end," "ever about," is
drained of joyful promise to become but the hyperbole of a grieving
insomniac. Where, In Memoriam wondered, do the souls of the departed go?
The speaker of Maud knows in his crazed perception that they carry on
their daily lives, clattering over their dead companions in a danse
macabre of ordinary life. Lazarus did not speak: these "dead [men]
chatter" with the inconsequence of the banal spirits in the
Victorian seance. In Memoriam prevented the reader from seeing the lines
that brought Hallam's flash of soul back, masking the language of
enchantment, the gateway between one world and another. Here, the words
of the buried man, with their gesture to the hallucinations in "The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), are unhindered, all too
audible. In the archest comment on In Memoriam's most luminous
hopes, this strangely orderly cascade from a disorderly brain, confirms,
in the bathos of its feeble sorrow, that fantasies of communication from
the grave take their origin in the most distressing confusion.

The last moment of Part II completes the separation of 1850 from
1855:

O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?
Is it kind to have made a grave so rough,
Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?
Maybe still I am but half-dead;
Then I cannot be wholly dumb;
I will cry to the steps above my head,
And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come
To bury me, bury me
Deeper, ever so little deeper. (II.V.334-342)

Deciding whether he is dead or not, and what that means for his
ability to communicate, the speaker's literalness about being
buried--he is a "quiet sleeper" so needs to be further
down--winningly concludes Maud's scrambling of In Memoriam's
most serious matters with a gothic joke. Hallam's living soul
apparently returned through hidden language and revealed nothing about
himself except, for a moment, the vitality of his continued existence.
Here, the words are spoken by the "dead," and, far from
bringing consolation or knowledge of the heavenly state, they are
mundane and crazy. In Memoriam dramatized the gleaming return of the
unspeaking deceased: Maud's garrulous speaker, believing himself
dead (or half-dead), desires simply the boundaries of the grave to be
restored.

The curious non-gothic of in Memoriam has become the maddened,
comic-gothic of Maud. These disturbing, witty, and disruptive scenes are
driven by Maud's impatience with the elegy, by a tense compound of
continual absorption with the idea of the returning or communicating
dead, and new self-reproach about it. "Deep down," says Aidan
Day, "there is a hopelessness in Maud, even a nihilism" that
comes from the poem's "deconstruction of the narratives by
which Western culture has sought to order human life" (p. 184). But
the resistance to improbable things that brought fragile hope did not
result, from the perspective of my argument, in anything like nihilism.
Read as a partial parody of In Memoriam's dealings with the dead,
Maud disclosed Tennyson seeking to move away, to distance himself, from
the strange desires and temptations to believe in forms of life that,
seeming to survive the grave, were beyond empirical certainty. By what
it chose to ironize, the poem suggests not Day's radical
skepticism, but Tennyson's effort, for a moment in 1855, to resist
a deeply lodged desire to succumb to consolations about the tomb, his
intention to place any future hopes on surer footing, to be more
circumspect in what he allowed himself to believe, and write down.

Maud looked back to In Memoriam. But what followed Maud in the
first publication looked back to Maud. Eventually, Tennyson, of course,
would return seriously to new ways in which the dead might return: the
discomfort of Maud was not final. (21) But the immediate aftermath of
Maud was different. Maud's implicit salute to things knowable and
empirically credible was in turn quietly affirmed, the ironic
relationship between the monodrama and Tennyson's past neatly
summed up in another subtle reprise, another upsetting of a
return-from-the-dead narrative. With what eventually became "The
Brook: An Idyl," Tennyson in Maud, and Other Poems offered a new
comment on the subdued argument with himself that was worked out in the
inhospitable textures of his little Hamlet. A brief narrative poem,
"The Brook" asked the reader to recognize, to feel, the pull
of a desire to believe in the dead's return. But it also answered
Tennyson's desire to keep his feet on the ground, replacing the
mysterious with the surety of empirical credibility, and playing out the
epistemological shifts that Maud had attempted. "The Brook"
recounts, at its close, the meeting of old Lawrence Aylmer with the
daughter of a woman he knew when young. Tennyson's narrative moves
from the apparently or near-miraculous to the rationally comprehensible,
from a furtive hint of a mysterious world to a restatement of the
empirical, knowable one. Sitting on a stile, Aylmer is thinking of Katie
Willows, the mother, who long ago left for Australia, when, "On a
sudden," he looks up:

There stood a maiden near,
Waiting to pass. In much amaze he stared
On eyes a bashful azure, and on hair
In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell
Divides threefold to show the fruit within:
Then, wondering, asked her 'Are you from the farm?'
'Yes' answer'd she. 'Pray stay a little: pardon me;
What do they call you?' 'Katie,' 'That were strange.
What surname?' 'Willows.' 'No!' 'That is my name.'
'Indeed!' and here he looked so self-perplext,
That Katie laughed, and laughing blushed, till he
Laughed also, but as one before he wakes,
Who feels a glimmering strangeness in his dream.
Then looking at her; 'Too happy, fresh and fair,
Too fresh and fair in our sad world's best bloom,
To be the ghost of one who bore your name
About these meadows, twenty years ago.'
'Have you not heard?' said Katie, 'we came back.
We bought the farm we tenanted before.
Am I so like her? so they said on board.
Sir, if you knew her in the her English days
That most she loves to talk of, come with me.
My brother James is in the harvest-field:
But she--you will be welcome--O come in!' (11. 204-228)

Tennyson's language of the visitation resonates with western
traditions of mythic or sacred returns. The Gospel accounts of
Jesus' resurrection, most obviously. Rather than a woman meeting a
man returning from the dead, as in the Christian narrative, a man
looks--like Jocelyn Pierston at the second and third Avice in
Hardy's The Well-Beloved (1892)--incredulously at a woman who seems
to have preserved her youth. Mary's belief that the resurrected
Jesus is the gardener is transformed to the most quotidian of queries to
Katie: "Are you from the farm?"

Other narratives of revival are here. Proserpine lingers behind
this scene, seasonally returning from the underworld to bring fruition
and new growth. But the mood and direction is not toward the enchanted.
Francis Turner Palgrave, retelling a version of Alcestis, had Admetos
cry, on seeing Alcestis miraculously returned, "'Mine, / My
one of all the world! my all in one!'" (22) Tennyson's
non-Alcestis obtains no such rapture as it stages no such supernatural
revival. Here, a young woman "returns from the dead" only for
an instant in the spectator's imagination as he muses on the
"glimmering strangeness" of an idea that cannot, he realizes,
be true. The return is not ghostly but rationally explicable. Saved not
from the underworld, the heroine of "The Brook" is brought
back alive from Australia by boat. Like the return of Elizabeth
Gaskell's Kinraid in Sylvia's Lovers (1863), there is an
explanation: there is neither "apparition" (to borrow the
title of Gaskell's chapter in which Kinraid comes back) nor
resurrection. The palimpsest of the Greek narrative of revival, in which
Browning figured central ambitions for resurrectionary poetry, (23)
effects the transformation in "The Brook" of the miraculous
into the credible, the marvelous into the mundane. And that is not
wholly without relevance as a clue to Maud's relations with In
Memoriam, with all the later poem's mistrust of
"supernatural" narratives of human returns, its provision of
an explanation as to where such ideas come from, and its reluctance to
give credence to anything that looks like a claim about the uncanny
vitality of the dead.

Isobel Armstrong thinks the primary relation between Maud and In
Memoriam is merely that the former suggests "the mourning
process" of the latter "has been arrested at its earliest
stages and turned morbid" (p. 269). But in truth Maud was far more
conscious of the elegy than this, and it looked persistently back to In
Memoriam, with, by turns, antiphonal, ironizing, and parodic purposes.
Among its central intentions was a repositioning of what In Memoriam
had, Tennyson thought for awhile in 1855, unguardedly claimed as an
answer to grief. Maud provides its reader with an exceptionally unclear
view of who the speaker is (what does he look like? is he tall or short,
dark or light? does he look mad or sane and calm?). It is apt that the
poem should, in this sense, fail to "call up" the image of its
central figure, as Browning's monologues sought to call up the
presence of their speakers as lively beings. Inviting the reader to
perceive confusion between the borders of the living and the dead as an
uncertain product of an uncertain mind, Maud was not inclined to imagine
the presence even of the living. And that was only a glimpse of its
bigger hesitation, for Maud's inventive restlessness with
Tennyson's most famous poem expressed just how impatient he now was
with an idea that words might somehow call up not the quick--but the
dead. However much the deceased were mourned, poetry in the age of
doubt, Maud suggested, should maintain a distance from any claims,
spiritualist-like or otherwise, that living souls could overcome the
tomb. Wherever Maud is, then, she is not here.

(6) The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 3 vols.
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987); hereafter cited as Poems.
All references to Tennyson's In Memoriam are to lyric numbers and
line numbers.

(7) For more on "almost-gothic" elements of In Memoriam,
see Julian Wolfreys, "The Matter of Faith: Incarnation and
Incorporation in Tennyson's In Memoriam," in Victorian
Hauntings: Spectrality, Haunting, the Gothic, and the Uncanny in
Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 59-74.